In this walkthrough and its accompanying sample, you’ll use C# and F# to start to develop web applications and cloud services that are hosted in Windows Azure. By following this walkthrough, you’ll get a web application, the WordGrid sample, running in Windows Azure as a cloud service. You can use that sample to explore how to integrate F# with a C# web application and, in general, how to use the power of F# in Windows Azure. The sample uses the ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) 4 framework, which provides a powerful and versatile library for web applications.

By reviewing this topic and the sample that accompanies it, you’ll learn how to create a web application (in this case, a word game) by using F#, C#, ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC), Windows Azure, and JavaScript. This topic demonstrates several useful coding techniques by explaining code excerpts from the WordGrid sample. You can build this sample as a web application and then run it locally or deploy it to Windows Azure as a cloud service. If you deploy it, players can access it from anywhere in the world by using their browsers.

Explains how to use the SqlDataConnection type provider to access the tables and stored procedures of a SQL database, based on a connection string for a direct connection to a database. The access uses a using a LINQ to SQL mapping.

Explains how to use the SqlEntityConnection type provider to access the tables and stored procedures of a SQL database, based on a connection string for a direct connection to a database. The access uses a LINQ to Entities mapping. This method works with any database but the example demonstrated is SQL Server.